Rosa Luxemburg — The Workers’ Movement Abroad

In this report, Rosa Luxemburg, aged just 22, reports passionately about the workers’ revolts in Italy and Sicily, dissecting the issue at hand with fierce conviction and clarity of analysis. One of her earliest works, it showcases the unrelenting commitment of the Polish revolutionary to internationalism from the very beginning.

Rosa Luxemburg’s article “The Workers’ Movement Abroad” was written at the end of 1893 and published in the newspaper “Sprawa Robotnicza” [The Worker’s Cause] no. 7 in January of 1894.

Source: Rosa Luxemburg, “Wybór pism” [Selected Works], Volume I, Warsaw (1959).

The Acheron would like to thank Jan Michalik for assisting with the translation greatly.

Rosa Luxemburg — The Workers’ Movement Abroad

In the last months of winter, daily news from Italy and the island of Sicily were terrible. Workers’ revolt! Uprising! Cities burning, clashes between the masses and the army, processions around the city with revolutionary slogans and songs — this is what was heard constantly from the Italian land. Today, there is “peace” there. The roar of rifle shots drowned out the revolutionary chants, blood flowed and several lives were lost, but “peace” and “order” returned. What did these masses of the Italian people want? How did they come to be? How did the uprising end?

In Italy, as everywhere, the masses of millions of people live in poverty and toil, and the few capitalists live in pleasure and idleness. But rarely is the poverty of people as great as it is there, in this beautiful land where the rich people from all over the world travel to squander the pennies squeezed out of the workers.

In Italy, the big factory industry is still very underdeveloped, the factory proletariat — sparse, but the rural and agricultural proletariat makes up the vast majority of the population. All of the land belongs to a small handful of big landowners, and small landowners hardly ever exist in Italy. The farmer working the land of the owner is either a najmita [a seasonal farm worker — ed.] or a lessee with the right to half of the crop; both are proletarians working for the owner for meager wages, sufficient for a dry piece of the worst kind of bread. It is only in some Italian provinces where the lessee takes half of the harvest, as he usually gets only a third of the crop. At best, a lessee, working with his wife and children, earns from 80 to 96 rubles a year. And these are the happier peasants! In many places, they earn only 55 rubles a year. But even this miserable wage does not remain entirely in the pocket of the peasant: indirect taxes on essential items take a large part of what the greed of the owner has left him. The people who eat dry bread are not able to salt it sufficiently: a high tax makes even salt too expensive for the peasant! Starving constantly while eating bread made from bad corn flour produces a special disease called pellagra [a disease caused by a lack of the vitamin niacin/B3 — ed.], from which thousands of miserable workers die every year.

But it’s the rural population of the island of Sicily that finds itself under the worst conditions. The land there — as everywhere else in Italy, belongs to a small number of big owners who let the wealthy bourgeoisie lease it, which in turn, leases it again to several sub-lessees, who break up the land into small pieces and distribute it to peasants for a huge amount of rent. The number of these sub-lessees usually reaches millions after 15 or so years. In this way, the peasant must work for the owner, the main lessee, and for the sub-lessee. In addition to the huge rent, the peasant is obliged to give the owner a part of the harvest and buy from him, naturally overpaying for the necessary items. This is still not all. The owner holds the municipal board in his hands and imposes indirect taxation on everyday products for his own benefit, as was done during serfdom… Surrounded by luxury, the owners and tenants throw away thousands each year, and the unfortunate laborer — the creator of their entire wealth, is starving from eating bread and onions. The distribution of wealth between idle parasites and the peasant is shown by the following example: a peasant family consisting of a husband, wife, 2 adult sons and 3 daughters, working all year round, earns only 19 rubles and 48 kopeks after paying the tenant 552 rubles and returning the grain to the owner for 184 rubles.

Yet, the Sicilian peasants are not the most unhappy among the workers, for they at least work in open air. There are workers in Sicily who work underground for dry bread and onions like condemned men, in the stale, noxious air. These are the workers in Sicilian sulfur mines. Not only adults, but also little boys work in this prison; adults mine the sulfur ore, and children carry it to the surface, climbing with a two-pud [Puda is an old Russian weight unit, 1 unit of which equals to 16.38 kilograms- ed.] weight up the narrow, sometimes collapsing stairs of a deep shaft. These unfortunate children are the real slaves of the older miners, who buy them from poor parents all summer for 40–60 rubles and make them work 12 hours a day for 15–20 kopeks. The miners are forced to act so cruelly because the owners of the mines hire only adult workers, of course — for the least payment. The Italian workers live in such conditions.

For far too long have they endured the exploitation of the owners and landlords without murmuring, but their patience has come to an end. Suffering and despair, obscured for many decades in the souls of the poor, had to explode with the fire of the uprising.

In Sicily, where the working people are subjected to the most inhumane oppression, the spirit of resistance had taken hold of the crowd earlier. With the onset of winter, the season of starvation for the people, a faint spark turned into a mighty fire. The people, bent under the yoke for centuries, suddenly stood upright. The rural workers, organized into unions, began to organize mass strikes; there were loud demands to change the conditions of land rent everywhere and in many places armed riots broke out. Men, women, and children threw themselves against the hated village and town boards, in which the landowners and the bourgeoisie held sway, and demanded the abolition of indirect taxes. Here and there the army fights the rebels, the latter occasionally victorious, the army gives way, and the rural and urban authorities are forced to comply with people’s demands. The revolution is rapidly flooding into Sicily, threatening a general uprising of the people; an uprising all the more dangerous to the exploiters because the Social Democrats at the head of the workers’ unions can give it unity and consciousness. The government was frightened. One must rush to the aid of the exploited Sicilians without wasting a moment of time. The example is contagious: the uprising of the Sicilians has found a resonance in Italy, especially in the neighboring southern provinces, turning from riots to outright revolts… Mass arrests of strikers, confiscations and bans on workers’ newspapers began; workers’ unions were dissolved, all members of union boards and the entire central executive of the Sicilian Social Democracy was imprisoned [1]. But when this did not help either, when it became apparent that the hungry people could not be satisfied with unlawful arrests and prohibitions, that their agitation continued to grow — the government redoubled its cruelties and decided to feed the people once and for all with bullets, bayonets and cartridges. While the king was prudently saving his millions from the imminent revolution by giving them to the English bank (in London) for safekeeping, his first minister arbitrarily sent up to 60,000 troops to Sicily, declared a state of siege throughout the island, made General Morra a dictator (unlimited ruler), replaced all existing laws with martial law and all civilian courts and authorities with martial ones. Since then one only hears again and again of new arrests in Sicily, cruel sentences, martial courts and the general disarmament of the population. The number of those arrested [is] so great that prisons have run out of place: in one town a… church has been turned into a prison.

The same [is] the result of an uprising in the neighboring southern Italian province of Massa-Carrara. Here the armed laborers, who worked in the marble quarries, arose. The reasons for the uprising are the same as in Sicily: a life of hunger while working hard, inhumane exploitation by the owners, the burden of indirect taxes. In addition, the work of laborers extracting marble to decorate the palaces of kings, magnates and rich people is connected with a great danger to life: a worker tied with ropes to a perpendicular marble rock — must saw off the slab from it. And how many human lives are lost when marble slabs are lowered down narrow, winding paths on the shores of a yawning abyss! God forbid, one carelessly lowering and smashing a precious plate! Capitalist property means more than the life of the worker! Let a few workers fall into the most dangerous abyss, as long as the marble slab survives…

With such perilous work, no precautions are observed: greedy mine owners do not even arrange mechanical devices to lower the marble slabs. Why would they? After all, the owner is responsible neither for the death nor for the disability of the workers — this is one of the terms of the contract between the workers and the owner. But on the basis of the same agreement, the owner has the right to dismiss the worker on any Saturday on the day of payment without any reason…

Closed off in mountain crevices, isolated from the World, the workers of Massa-Carrara bent their necks patiently for a long time. The uprising of the Sicilian brothers lit a flame of rebellion in their hearts: they came down from their mountains and, arms in hand, tried to face the enemy… The enemy turned out to be stronger: the sent army suppressed the uprising. And here, as in Sicily, the general rules unlimitedly, the martial courts are utterly strict, the prisons are overcrowded…

And the parliament, the assembly of the nation's representatives? The government did not convene the parliament, even though the law requires it! To oppress the people without a parliament is far more comfortable! Although today the Italian parliament — like all other parliaments — represents not only the people, but the enemies, the exploiters of the people; nevertheless, among the deputies there are Social Democrats who are faithful defenders of the people. They try to tear the veil off from all the affairs of the government and display all its rogue activities before the people. It would also not be possible to arrest a Social Democratic deputy arbitrarily during the deliberations of the parliament, as General Morr did in Sicily.

The uprising is crushed, the government triumphs. But will this last? Will the nation satisfy its hunger with the sight of the cannons surrounding it? No minister, no general is capable of firing, slaughtering, murdering and imprisoning a population of three million; and the three million people of Sicily have as comrades and allies the rest of miserable, roughly twenty million Italian people in their struggle. The uprising was suppressed as each local, separate movement was crushed; but the defeated people are undoubtedly a far more dangerous enemy for existing relations than before the uprising. In many places, the insurgents, destroying the town hall, cried out: “Long live the king!” The backwards people always think that the cause of all evil is the closest authority, and the king, the emperor — is the father, the protector of the people. But now that the millionaire king has sent his treasures to the London bank and his cannons against the hungry people, his name will be as hateful as the people’s closest exploiters.

The uprising has been crushed, but its causes [remain] intact, and the people, once shaking off the current yoke, will never again reconcile with it. The Italian Social Democrats will carry out the work that has already begun to raise the awareness and unify the rural proletariat. If the ruling plunderers, not learning from experience, drive the people to an uprising again, they will be dealing not with the local, but with the general uprising of the entire Italian people.

The Social Democratic workers movement in Italy is still very nascent. The Italian Workers’ Party finally organized in August 1892. However, during its brief existence, the Italian Social Democracy managed to become a reasonable force. It already has over 200,000 members united in nearly 270 local and district unions. More than 20 newspapers spread socialist ideas among the Italian workers; recently, the party has started to publish a daily magazine. During the parliamentary elections (November 1892), the party put forward 25 candidates, three of which were elected, the rest receiving a considerable number of votes. The party was even more popular in the municipal elections; in many urban and rural communes, Social Democrats were elected to city and village boards.

Along with the political organization, the organization of trade unions is also developing rapidly. New unions keep appearing, and the number of members in the old ones is increasing. The unions of one city form a general labor exchange [where one would go to seek for and take up a new job, a jobcentre — ed.] — an institution that collects information about the demand and supply of labor; in this way, workers are freed from the exploitation of private killing machines. The labor exchange also represents organized workers in relations with municipal and state authorities and in cases of dispute — with factory owners. The labor exchange building serves as a meeting place for all unions and union workers. Finally, the labor exchange fosters the development of old and the formation of new unions.

Besides that, the printers, stonemasons, lithographers and glovers of all Italy are united into general guilds; the guilds of printers and masons have their own separate newspaper, and the glovers of all Italy form a branch of the international guild of this craft.

A characteristic feature of the Italian Social Democracy is its spread and influence among the rural proletariat. Following in the footsteps of its urban comrades, the rural proletariat began to group itself into unions under the banner of Social Democracy to fight against the inhumane exploiters. The propaganda of the Social Democrats among the rural population found fertile soil in all parts of Italy. The rural proletariat, which is waking up everywhere, sees Socialism as the only salvation, the Social Democracy — the only support against the exploiters. The Social Democracy in Sicily is making particularly good progress. Of the three million inhabitants of the island, no less than two million have joined the party! Within a short time, up to 200 unions of rural workers and peasants with 360,000 members were established there. The unions are headed by Social Democrats known throughout Italy. A union of sulfate miners was also formed. The first congress of Sicilian miners met on October 12th last year [1892]. This congress immediately showed that the Sicilian miners had joined the great international army of the Socialist proletariat. Having argued in favor of the urgent need to improve the working conditions of adult workers and minors, the congress also declared that the complete liberation of both miners and all working people would not take place until the day of the triumph of Socialism, when the land, mines, factories, workshops and all other tools of labor would become collectively owned by the workers.

So we can hope that in due time, all those who have expressed their protest in desperate and unbridled outbursts should join the ranks of the organized proletariat, walking consciously and systematically, with the banner of Socialism in hand, to the complete abolition of these terrible, inhumane social relations.

Footnotes

[1] This number includes a Social Democratic deputy, although according to the law, a deputy cannot be arrested without the consent of the parliament [Luxemburg’s note].